Alpine ski racing, baseball, and contact sports such as lacrosse inherently involve intentional and accidental contact between an athlete's forearm and ski racing poles, baseballs, and lacrosse sticks, respectively.
In particular, Alpine ski racing has been a competitive sport for over 100 years. An essential part of competition requires a skier to ski between and through a series of racing gates at different points along the length of a ski course down the slope of a mountain. High speeds between 40 and 70 miles per hour are usually attained and intentional contact between the skier's forearm and the poles of the ski gates are common in order to be as close as possible to the gate thereby reducing the time it takes for the skier to reach the bottom and end of the race course. As such, a skier may sustain significant injury to their forearms after contacting one or many of the gates during one or more runs down the ski course. Therefore it became necessary to protect ski racers' forearms using a protective forearm guard.
Past and current attempts to guard a skier's forearm have included designs that used rigid panels secured to the skier's arms using straps with removable fasteners such as hook and loop, hook and catch, buckles, or Velcro. The down side of these forearm guard designs are numerous. For one, the usual size and shape sold in stores rarely fit securely and comfortably around each individual skier. In addition, during ski racing and contact with the poles of the gates, some of the straps would come loose and the guard would become insecure. Furthermore, it can be difficult and time consuming to apply and remove each guard to each arm since usually can only be done with one hand as the other is inaccessible due to the position that the arm and hand is in while trying to attach the guard. Finally, securing the guard to the forearm with removable fasteners requires removing one's ski glove to place the guard on the contralateral forearm making this task difficult in arctic cold weather.
Therefore, it is in the athlete's benefit to have a design to overcome these deficiencies.